January 5, 2012

Kevin Kennedy, director and general counsel of the board... testified that entering signatures into a database to look for duplicates could take eight extra weeks for his staff, and could cost $94,000 for software and outside help.

But the judge said they must make "reasonable" efforts. I think making a searchable database is crucial. You've got to at least check for duplicates. And I think people — like me — who didn't sign should be given the ability to ensure that our names were not appropriated.

For the amount of money the Democrats and the state are going to spend on this, they could have gotten some good candidates groomed and out there making appearences in prepreation for the 2012 and 2014 elections.

Kind of like Republicans did after getting their asses handed to them in 2006 and 2008.

I don't know the law in Wisconsin, I have no idea what the legal rights and wrongs of it are, but this is the sensible answer, and one hopes that the instances in which the law's answer deviates from the sensible answer are few and far between.

So wait a minute Mark, you're telling me that Walker was the one who brought the theft to the authorities? Next thing you'll probably say is that Russell, the guy who Garage thinks is going to bring down Walker, didn't even work for Walker when Walker became Governor.

In Colorado, petitions are validated by the Secretary of State's office against a statewide voter database mandated by the Federal Help America Vote Act. State law, if I recall correctly, allows the SOS to randomly select 5 percent of the signatures for checking and if the percent of valid signatures for that sample extrapolates to enough valid signatures then the measure goes on the ballot. If the extrapolation is in the 90-110 percent range, then the entire petition has to be checked. If it's less than 90%, then it's toast.

So the GAB, if they wanted to, could use this method to quickly get an idea of where the petition stands. At 5%, they'd have to check about 27K signatures.

I volunteer to do it for $92,500, in return for which I will also kick back to the state legislature a set of fourteen travel vouchers each good for a week's stay at any Motel 6 in the state of Illinois.

I'm quite sure that leftist droids like garage fantasized a quick and easy recall victory. But, the devil is in the details.

The entire process was essentially aborted when actual living (assumed) people asserted that Mickey Mouse and a certain german dictator for example could be considered valid recall petition signatures. Just try signing Elmer J Fudd on a financial commitment doc and watch the lawyers fight over which one should choke you.

Not really. See, he and his ilk have convinced themselves Walker is corrupt & evil (and of course they are on the benevolent side) and nothing can change that. No facts, nothing.

So when this silly temper tantrum collapses under its own weight (of stupidity) there will soon be stories on think progress about rumors of how one of the GAB members is the 2nd cousin of someone who once worked for Koch Industries.

They'll call the whole process corrupt and move on to how the Republican Presidential nominee is a racist. And that will be that.

"I feel sorry for normal people in Wisconsin. This has become comic farce."

Sure.

But just as bad money chases out good, so too do bad people chase out good ones. Wisconsin's public employee unions wish to cannibalize Wisconsin's fisc; sadly for them, they are much too dim to realize that once they finish the job, the only people left to fleece will be themselves.

Recall organizers are collecting petitions now to recall Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and four Republican state senators. The petitions are due to the accountability board Jan. 17, and the board is charged with validating them and deciding if recalls are warranted.

I've never heard that before. Are they really starting down that path again? Maybe they should make the term of a state senator to be four months and just hold elections three times a year. What the hell is wrong with people in Wisconsin? Are infantile temper tantrums replacing dairy as the primary industry?

I think that it's very likely that the State of Wisconsin owns at least one relational database system(which can eliminate duplicates) - scratch $94K. Then figure the labor cost of entering the data to be at most $112K; 540,000 entries divided by 2 per minute (data entry) divided by 60 minutes per hour multiplied by $25 per hour. And this could be drastically reduced if they could use an optical document scanner.

The upside of a searchable database is that Ann can see if anyone appropriated her name.

The downside is that Walker supporters could use the list to bring social pressure against the signators. The left has done this in the past to signators of gay-marriage-related initiatives in other states.

Spend the $100K to have the info typed into a series of text files and any competent programmer can write what is called a “merge-sort” to identify and remove the duplicate entries. There are off-the-shelf packages that can do that; Opttech's sorting program comes to mind for $149.

A single pass of the sort program and the duplicate are removed, saved to a file, and the names are still in essentially an unusable format.

http://www.moodys.com/research/MOODYS-LOWERS-STATE-OF-ILLINOIS-GO-RATING-TO-A2-FROM--PR_234787Our credit rating is A-OK thanks to the reforms - but our friends in Illinois are still stuck with there "severe pension funding shortfalls"

"purplepenquin said...And did the WI-GOP have these same sort of concerns when they were submitting recall petitions againt Dems? I truly can't remember this being an issue then, but I may have missed it..."

You've made this point before, have you forgotten the answer?

Validity of signatures is not a difficult issue when you are talking a senate district...lots less signatures to deal with. Here we are talking 700,000 with the same amount of time for the recalling party to protest.

I can't speak for the Wisconsin GOP but I think most of us assumed the GAB was fulfilling their duty to ensure the integrity of the process. It wasn't until the Walker recall that the GAB came out with mixed messages on signing multiple times along with the statement that they would accept virtually any name whether valid or not. Add in the fact that you have a statewide recall with 100's of thousands of signatures and its easy to see why many see opportunities for mischief.